Privatizing Social Security (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report)

Book Description:

This volume represents the most important work to date on one of the pressing policy issues of the moment: the privatization of social security. While social security encounters enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an aging population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. Privatizing Social Security fills this void by studying retirement benefits in systems based on individual saving in funded accounts.

The book begins with an introductory paper by Martin Feldstein that provides a powerful argument for reform by overviewing the economic effects of social security and the system’s current dire situation. The next chapters investigate how five different countries-Argentina, Australia, Chile, Great Britain, and Mexico-have experienced privatization of their social security systems. The final five papers consider the economics of a privatized social security system in the United States.

This book will be of interest to government policy makers and private pension experts, in addition to economists.